Urban school reform: Levin’s latest offering

Ben Levin, who wrote a report on Nova Scotia’s education system, speaks last year at a news conference with Education Minister Ramona Jennex. (ERIC WYNNE / Staff)

Ben Levin, the Toronto consultant known in our province for his May 2011 report on Nova Scotia education, has now weighed in on the state of urban school reform, producing a new book with Jane Gaskell, former dean of the University of Toronto’s faculty of education. It is much more revealing about Levin’s personal outlook and perspective than his rather terse, research-based report on our P-12 school system.

Improving public education in Canada’s poorest urban areas is not only a daunting task, but one that has devoured well-intentioned, fiercely determined school reformers since the early 1960s. In Making a Difference in Urban Schools: Ideas, Politics and Pedagogy (University of Toronto Press, soft cover, 219 pages, $31.95) the two Toronto academic researchers see city schools as a primary vehicle in the larger social struggle to reduce poverty in inner-city communities.

Fresh from his Nova Scotia undertaking, Levin teams up with Gaskell to take a hard look at what has actually been accomplished, over four decades, in two major urban school districts, Toronto and Winnipeg.

Success has proven elusive in both cities. More than 30 years after a group of reform-minded, left-leaning trustees appeared on the old Toronto public city board, the two authors conceded that in both cities stubborn social inequalities persisted and student results continued to lag, particularly in lower socio-economic areas and among aboriginal and visible minority communities. More tellingly, most of the 50 school reform allies interviewed over this 10-year — on again, off-again — research project were “disappointed with what had been achieved.”

Gaskell and Levin describe themselves as “children of the 1960s.”

Gaskell is a well-known feminist scholar, raised in Toronto, but with a lengthy career stop in Vancouver before returning home. It was in Winnipeg where Levin came of age, first as a high school “student radical,” then scaling the heights from a youthful school trustee to chief provincial bureaucrat, as a deputy minister of education in both Manitoba and Ontario.

Yesterday’s radicals have found their niche in the inner sanctum. Today, as leading social democratic reformers, they are really consummate Ontario education policy insiders and ranking members of the current Toronto educational establishment.

Gaskell and Levin claim that, while they initiated the project out of “social and political conviction,” an attempt was made to research and write the book in “an analytic and balanced way.” If that was their intention, it was not at all evident to this reviewer.

School reform at the Toronto board is approached almost entirely through the vantage point of their allies on the political left. A group of Toronto reform trustees in the 1960s and 1970s, driven by NDPers Fiona Nelson, Dan Leckie, and Gordon Cressy, are the heroes of the storyline and, next to them, the Winnipeg social democrats Lionel Orlikow and Gary Selinger come off like bit players in a Western Canadian sideshow.

The authors are well attuned to the politics and competing interests at the core of public debates over education reform. As a former school trustee, Levin is particularly sympathetic to the challenges facing democratically-elected school board members. The “views and skills of trustees” do matter, the book points out, particularly when they possess the political “will and skill” to sustain a policy direction, to guide senior staff, and to forge alliances across party or ideological lines.

The two authors, much like community activists in the 1970s and ’80s, put their faith in investing heavily in support programs, then grudgingly recognizing the need for means of measuring the impact upon student outcomes.

Former TSB Director Joan Green’s critical role in introducing student assessment testing is given short shrift. Perhaps that’s because the first EQAO Toronto student test results (1997-98) were so abysmal, especially for the board with the highest expenditures per student in the entire province.

Concerned parents and taxpayers are also essentially missing from the story. No reference whatsoever is made to the champions of higher standards, such as Doretta Wilson of the Organization for Quality Education, Ontario testing expert Dr. Dennis Raphael, and the idiosyncratic This Magazine is About Schools co-founder Bob Davis.

A certain sadness pervades Gaskell and Levin’s Making a Difference. For the authors, the 1970s and 1980s were the “heyday” of well-funded urban schools. After George Radwanski’s 1987 Ontario education report pinpointing the system’s weaknesses, supporters of progressive “child-centred” learning gradually found themselves out-of-step with the public.

Nova Scotians may be surprised to learn that Levin is so wistful about the ‘good old days’ when few questioned spending more and more on public education to fix the social deficits. That may explain why his 2011 report provides no costing for its recommendations and is so light on measures to raise the quality of student learning in all schools whatever their socio-economic context.